Microstory 752: Grace

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Twins Grace and Hannah were not born in a very loving world, yet they were loved. The sky was completely dark, with no sun, and no other stars. Their only sources of light were harsh and artificial. Time was also never on their side. There were 53 minutes to an hour, and nineteen hours in a day, making the simple act of calculating the future needlessly difficult. With no celestial movement in the sky marking these time periods, this arbitrary system served only to remind the people that they had no control over their own lives. The average work shift lasted literally the entire day, followed by a single day of rest in between shifts. After their mother’s death, they were raised by their father and uncle, but rarely saw the two of them together, since their shifts had to complement each other. This was particularly problematic since Uncle Torin and their father, Reid had fallen in love with each other, a relationship which was strictly forbidden. The religious order that dominated every aspect of their lives was not fundamentally opposed to homosexuality, but rejected it for logistical reasons. Their entire ideological system was built on strengthening themselves through numbers, so a couple incapable of procreation is entirely useless to them. Torin and Reid did the best they could with their daughters, but nothing would help what would inevitably come on the girls’ eighteenth birthday. Halfway towards adulthood, children are almost always removed from their original parents, and placed in a home so far away that their real parents have never even heard of it. To make matters worse, their new parents will always have just lost their own children for the same reason. The religion leaders claim some children are allowed to remain with their birth parents throughout their entire lives, assuming they receive the required results on their test, but this has never been witnessed. Most people believe this to be a lie purported to maintain the religion’s control over everyone, even if parents always hope it is somehow not a lie, and that it happens to their own children. Some families try to escape this fate by running away, but there is no evidence that anyone has ever succeeded. There is nowhere in the world that is not under constant monitoring, and no one ever otherwise strays beyond the boundaries of their town. Hours after taking their test, Grace and Hannah were expected to be spirited away, just as all the others, and their fathers were fully intending to run. The test showed results that no one had ever heard of before, however, which severely complicated matters. They would still have to run, but they would not have to do it alone...

Microstory 751: Boot

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In the world of amateur information technology, there are many different kinds of people. Some wear white hats, and are most likely to become legally sound IT professionals. Others wear black hats, and use their skills to hurt people, oftentimes for their own gain. Yet others wear gray hats, because they commit crimes using computers, but do so for what they believe to be good reasons. These are the hacktivists, who see injustices in the world, and do not have enough faith in the system to take care of it without their intervention. Of course, within these categories, some are better than others. The best either everyone has heard of, or no one has. But most people who involve themselves in computer science outside of a professional setting are just normal people who make only a minor impact on the world. Out of these, some understand how computers work to such a low degree that they are not able to create exploits, or write the code to new programs, on their own. They are known as script kiddies, and almost every one of them is embarrassed to be referred to as such, or are at least hoping to outgrow this designation by learning more. One, however, has chosen to embrace this so deeply that he’s adopted it as part of his identity. Cormac Allegro was always pretty decent with computers. He found himself helping his grandparents open and close their web browsers a lot when he was younger. Fellow students, whose families could not afford machines of their own, often asked him for help troubleshooting simple problems. He was good at tackling these issues, because the programs were already there, waiting for him to use.

When he was a teenager, he stumbled upon the world of hackers, and realized that he wanted to be one of them. He started lurking on message boards and chat rooms, looking for someone to trust with teaching him the trade. He found a couple people who were willing to take him under their wing, and they started him off with fairly simple program modification hacks. These involved altering features of desktop applications in ways unintended by the software programmers, and had no effect on anybody else’s use of these programs. Pretty soon, he was using brute force executables to crack his friend’s passwords, sending prank messages to third parties under the guise of someone else. These were mostly considered to be nuisances, and he wasn’t so much as on the radar of any law enforcement agency. His mentors tried to teach him programming languages, but he struggled significantly with this. He just could not understand the coding syntax. Code that should have taken hours to write was taking him days, or even weeks. He just was not getting it, so the mentors forgot about him, and moved on. He would never truly be one of them. But he still wanted to use computers for his own personal gain. He continued as an oddly highly experienced script kiddie. He carved his own presence on the dark web with a gallery of useful online tools for other script kiddies to use for whatever they wanted, until they were educated enough to make their own. Once they did—because Kiddie’s website, Boot Force, was such a great early resource for them—they would send him their programs, so Boot Force’s gallery could grow even larger. Despite being so ill-equipped himself, Cormac ‘Kiddie’ Allegro became known as the best source of all things hacking, and this is when the Domestic Affairs Service started taking notice. After what should have been a far shorter investigation done by a joint task force between DAS and the Continental Datawork Agency, Kiddie was finally caught. And that is where his story begins.

The Advancement of Leona Matic: August 15, 2161

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Things were always a little different every time Leona and Serif returned to the timestream after having missed an entire interim year. Children looked much older, spring cleaning led to rearranged households, and small shops were torn down to make room for something newer. That just came with the territory for people who lived like this, but never had they experienced such a dramatic shift. It was horrifying to at one second be looking at a perfectly normal town, and the next at that town having been leveled. Not a single building remained standing after whatever had come through was done with its job. If Leona had to guess, she would say this was the work of one of the worst earthquakes in history.

It must have happened recently, but not too recently, because nothing was left smoldering. One of the dangers with an earthquake is that it starts fires that can cause residual damage for days, maybe even weeks. As the two of them were carefully crawling over the debris, they noticed this fire damage, but in its aftermath stage. Why, after all this time, the technologically superadvanced people of the day had not cleaned this up yet? Was it worse than they could see now? How many other towns had been affected? Once near the edge of the former town, they squinted in the distance, and could see the megastructure still standing strong, having been designed to withstand the worst of the worst, so that was something. Though that didn’t explain why they had not yet raced over here and taken care of this.

“Now that we’re out, we need to find a way to communicate with our people,” Leona said.

“Agreed,” Serif replied. “I suppose our only hope is to walk all the way to the arcology.”

Just then, they heard a kind of cackling sound. Or clicking. They weren’t quite sure, but they looked around to find a blur zipping behind piles of rubble. Whatever it was, it was stalking them. They tried to run away, but it continued to follow them. It knocked Leona down to her stomach, but then flipped her over. On top of her was a creature she hadn’t seen before, and could not exist. It had skinny arms and legs, and a formicated face, with curved horns on the back of its neck. It kept disappearing and reappearing. Leona turned her head to the side to see it hunched over Serif as well. It was dashing between them, never staying too long on top of one, so it could dash back to the other at incredible speed. And it was definitely cackling, in a way that made it appear to have some kind of sentience. Leona didn’t know what it was planning on doing, or why it was waiting to do it, but they fortunately never had a chance to find out. Something reached down and pulled the creature off of her. Dar’cy was there, wielding a bo staff. The beast maintained its concentration on her, knowing her to be the greatest threat. They battled it out for a good few minutes, the beast using its superspeed to try and throw Dar’cy off guard, but Dar’cy was always ready for it. Finally, she managed to knock it to the ground where she bombarded it with blow after blow before taking a knife from a sheath, and slitting its throat.

“What in the world was that!” Serif cried scrambling to her feet.

“A speedstriker,” Dar’cy answered. She started cleaning the blood from her blade on the grass. “Sorry I didn’t get here sooner. I miscalculated the ingress thread. I’m still not as good at object threading as my father is.”

“That’s just fine,” Leona said. “We’re more worried about what happened here, and where that thing came from.”

“Was he some kind of genetically engineered transgenic supersoldier gone wrong?” Serif imagined.

Dar’cy laughed. “No, it’s from another world; one that passed into our solar system nearly three months ago. It got so close to Earth and Mars that it caused massive quakes on all three worlds. As it passed over, some Earthans were pulled onto it—at least, so we believe, since they’re missing—and some Durune were dropped here, including the speedstrikers. We think they came on purpose, though, since they’re fast enough to control where they are.”

“That’s impossible,” Leona said. “For an object to be large enough to cause gravitational disturbances, we would have to see it coming...years in advance.”

“It’s...” Dar’cy stammered. “A weird planet; full of temporal anomalies. There was apparently once a town called Springfield, Kansas that was sucked into a giant portal many years ago. Some of the residents survived and built a civilization there, and at some point, accidentally sent their planet flying towards ours, much faster than normal physics allows. Actually, from what I gather, Durus would have eventually collided with Earth anyway, but someone made it happen faster, and someone ultimately prevented it.”

“So the town...” Leona began.

“Is one of many,” Dar’cy finished. “It tore apart anything on this hemisphere that wasn’t built to survive an apocalypse. We’re lucky it didn’t happen a century ago, or the human race would probably be nearing extinction levels.”

“Where’s everybody else? Are they okay? Were they here when it happened?”

“We did not stay here,” Dar’cy held back a giggle. “It’s nice and all, but nothing interesting happened in towns like this, ya know...until the last thing that ever happened to them. We didn’t really go our separate ways, but we did have our own lives, keeping in touch only as possible. Paige has been in charge of a small group of present-day shapers, which is weird because you generally think of them as living in the past, but for them, this is the past. Brooke is a ferry pilot between Earth and Mars, but is considering transferring to the Ceres route. Missy was an engineer where she comes from, but that was a long time ago, so she’s studying to catch up on today’s technology. And me? I’ve just been meditating and practicing. I don’t even thread objects that much. I’m not only not as good as my father, but I also don’t have the same passion for it. What have you two been up to?” she joked.

“Living on the island,” Serif started, “I forgot what it was like to come back to such dramatic changes. Back then, the biggest thing to happen in the year was Lita finding a new edible plant, or Aura finishing a quilt.”

“I’m sure this is quite daunting, and disheartening,” Dar’cy said, nodding. “I wish there was something I could do.”

“It’s fine,” Serif promised. “These is our lives now.”

“Well, we should probably get going,” Dar’cy said. “It’s taken some time for the Earthans to figure out what they’re going to do about the speedstriker problem, but I believe they’re ready to take this all away.”

They boarded an aircraft and flew away from Ireland to return to Kansas City for the first time in two decades/three weeks. It looked about the same as it had back then, but much greener. The only major man made structure in the area was another arcology; one of the largest in the world, according to Dar’cy. They met Missy for lunch at her place, along with her roommate, Curtis, one of the teleporters from Leona’s tribulations in the other timeline. They served a dish of crickets, which was the first and last time Leona would ever eat that. Paige showed up later, and couldn’t stay long. She couldn’t talk about what her shaper team was doing, because it gave away too much about the future, which was ridiculous, because there were plenty of ways to find out what the future held.

Though they did not know Missy very well, and Curtis even less, they were invited to stay with them the night, in a room usually used for exercise. “One night a year to accommodate two new friends is not anywhere close to being an inconvenience,” Missy said about it. “Consider this your home, from now unto eternity.”

Leona and Serif lay in bed next to each other as midnight approached, unable to sleep, even under all this modern comfort. “You’re still a wake.”

Serif just grunted.

“Are you as worried as I am?” Leona asked.

“Every time we get comfortable and confident, something comes in to rob us of our delusion.”

“That’s true.”

“We took care of Reaver, then he came back as our friend, Horace. The Cleanser died, then he returned briefly as regular ol’ immortal, Zeferino. But he’s all dead now. For his death, his sister, Nerakali came after us. She’s dead too, and never came back. But because of time travel, she could show up at any point. Now you tell me they had a sister named Arcadia who tortured us for weeks, but she was torn out of time, which...is probably permanent, but hell I know?”

“Decent summary of our lives.”

“You mean to ask me what my point is?”

“I know what you’re point is. Do the Prestons have some other sibling we never knew about? Is some fourth version of Horace Reaver gonna turn out to be the most evilest of them all? Is there some new danger lurking in the shadows? Are we rapidly approaching a time period of great strife and death, that we have to somehow defeat? What’s this Durus place, and are the speedstrikers the worst it has to offer, or are they just the tip of the iceberg?”

“Decent summary of my point.” They held the silence for a good long while. Serif continued, “aren’t you going to assure me that everything’s gonna be okay?”

“Why would I lie?”

“You wouldn’t.”

They fell asleep before midnight hit, and woke up with everything as it was before. Missy and Curtis were waiting for them in the living room when they came out. They reported no problems over the course of the interim year. Dar’cy arrived during breakfast with similar unexceptional news. A couple of hours later, though, a much older Xearea Voss teleported in.

She let them hug her real quick before getting down to business. “I’m here to remind you that I am not going to live forever. The powers that be have discovered where the next, and last ever, Savior will be born.”

“Where?” Leona asked.

“And what does that have to do with us?” Serif furthered.

“You are being tasked with retrieving the young one from her homeworld,” Xearea said, “Durus.”

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Void: Threshold (Part I)

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After the death of her partner, Vearden, Saga felt a void in her life. The only way she could keep it from swallowing her up was to throw herself into her work. When she first discovered she was a time traveler, she felt trapped and helpless. She had no control over her life, and was beholden to the whims of a mysterious group of people pulling her strings. After getting a small taste of real power, however, she discovered how to seize her own destiny. She tried to use her new tricks to relax, but that only lasted a few days before her deep depression started taking over her. She decided the only way to keep herself from thinking about what she lost was to stay busy.

She ran all throughout time and space, opening magic doors from mission to mission. She used her experiences as a nurse to treat injured warriors, and provide medicine for people living in eras before medical science had caught up her. She helped in other ways too, executing plans in historic revolutions, and taking power from tyrannical leaders. She made a name for herself as being the hardest working temporal manipulator in the timeline. But she was working herself to death, and this could not last forever.

At present, she was slinking around the lower levels of the Rice-Eccles Stadium, during the closing ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah. KISS was performing on the stage above, under threat of a series of bombs that would kill thousands, and injure many more. Saga was there to stop it, which was foolish of her, since she knew next to nothing about explosives. She was about to turn a corner when she heard voices. She pressed herself against the wall and carefully looked around the edge to see what she was dealing with. Two men in military garb were standing over one of the bombs, apparently putting it in place. They were just having a casual conversation while they were installing it too, like this was just a lazy Sunday. She took a deep breath, checked the bullets in her gun, and jumped out. “Stop what you’re doing!” she ordered.

The men stopped and looked at her.

“You are not a security guard,” one of them said.

She pulled the hammer back. “Neither are you.”

“Well, technically we are,” he replied, not scared at all of Saga, or her weapon.

“Voss, get back to work,” the other one said.

“Do you have any idea how dangerous it is down her, lady?” the one called Voss asked of her.

“Agent Voss, would you please disarm this bomb before we all die?”

Saga lowered her arms slightly, but kept the gun in the ready position. At least she did so to the best of her ability. Though she had spent a lot of time in war, she never truly learned how to use these things properly. It was probably pretty obvious to these guys too. “You’re...you’re agents? You’re trying to disarm them?”

“That’s right,” Agent Voss confirmed.

“Why aren’t there more of you?” Saga asked.

“Why would there be more?” Voss volleyed.

“Because there are two dozen bombs, and only sending two guys seems a bit...inefficient.”

“Other agents are busy with other things.”

“Other agents. In the FBI? Homeland? Something else?”

Agent Voss just smirked.

“Agent, I don’t know how to do this!” the other one complained.

Voss looked back. “Yeah, neither do I. This one is different.”

“How is it different?” the other agent asked.

Voss turned back around. “Look at these wires; they’re not even color-coded. This was designed to not be disarmed. We could slow it down by freezing it, but there’s nothing else we can do.”

“Why were the others not built like this?”

“Because it’s complicated as all hell, and it wasn’t necessary. As soon as this one goes off, the ones we supposedly disarmed will go off in a chain reaction.”

“Can we move it?”

“That’ll set it off too. We remove it from the column it’s strapped to, and we have about five seconds before it’s all over.”

“Five seconds?” Saga asked for clarification, holstering her gun. She looked around for the nearest door, which was not super close, and maybe not close enough.

“That’s right. You think you can get out of the building that fast?” Voss asked, laughing.

“Well, I can get out of the building, but I don’t think I can do it that quickly. How fast can you run?” she asked him.

They were both thrown off by her demeanor, which was completely serious.

“You think you can get to that door before it explodes?”

Agent Voss looked down to it. “That’s about thirty yards, so yeah, probably, but it leads to a staircase, so it wouldn’t do us any good.”

“Can you? Or probably can?” she pressed.

“I definitely could if I injected myself with adrenaline, and there was some magic portal over th—” He stopped. “Is there a magic portal over there?”

Now she was the one smiling. “Not yet.”

He smiled back. “You’re a choosing one.”

“I’m halfway between salmon and chooser.”

“Never heard of that.”

“There are only two of us.” She flipped her smile upside down. “Well, now there’s only one.” She started walking towards the door. “Get ready for my signal.”

While Voss was removing his outer garb that was restricting his movement, the other agent questioned him, “are we sure we can trust her? Just because she’s one of you doesn’t mean she’s one of the good ones.”

“You’re gonna have to learn to trust people, Fortier.”

“I was trained to not tru...” Saga walked out of earshot of their inside voices, and stood at the door. She took another deep breath, and concentrated. In order to transported something from one time and place to another, she could just walk there. But if she wanted to move an object elsewhere without going with it, she needed a door. And she needed a door on the other side too. There weren’t many doors in history safe enough to throw a bomb through. She risked hurting people with most of them, but there were a few where she could be certain nobody was around.

“Can you go ahead and open it!” Agent Voss called up to her.

“Uhh...no! I’ll die if I do! I’ll open it at the exact right time! One I do, push the bomb through it, and run to the side as fast as you can!”

“Okay!” he called back after a thoughtful pause.

She was just glad the bomb was on wheels. Fortier jabbed something into Voss’ leg, and then quickly undid the straps. Voss bolted towards the door, pushing the bomb in front of him like a deadly shopper on Black Friday. The casters were making too much noise for her to hear, but she imagined the clock beeping down from five. When he was as close as he could safely be, Saga pushed open the door, and flew out of it into the vacuum of space. She was holding onto the hatch of Sputnik 2, which had just begun orbiting Earth in November of 1957. She knew she would be opening a gateway to the black, but she didn’t know it would try to pull her through. As death expanded inside her body, she watched the force pull Voss and the bomb towards the same fate. Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea. He seemed well equipped to handle it, though. He jumped out of the opening and wrapped his arms around her. The next thing she knew, they were landing on the grass, on the surface of some planet. A dog was barking next to them. Then she blacked out.

Saga woke up in the hospital next to Agent Voss, who was eating pudding and petting the dog. Upon seeing her awake, the dog jumped off his bed, and onto hers.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“2057,” Voss answered.

“Is this Laika?”

“Who?” he asked.

“The dog. The space dog. Did we save Laika?”

“I don’t know about that. I saved you, after you saved tens of thousands.”

She massaged her head and sat up. “You’re a time jumper.”

“Salmon.” He reached over and mimed shaking her hand. “The name’s Agent Camden Voss, but my the powers that be, and my superiors, call me Centurion. Are you thirsty?”

Just then a past version of Saga walked into the room, holding a tray of food and water.

“I don’t remember this,” Future!Saga said.

“I’m going to have my memories erased later,” Past!Saga explained.

“Eh, time travel, right?” Camden said. He finished his pudding and swung his legs around to sit on the edge of his bed. “Speaking of which, let me know when you’re well enough to leave, and if you wanna leave. I need to get back to my sister. She’s become the new Savior.”

“She has? When?”

“2102. If I don’t get back there soon, I may never see her again.” He closed his eyes. “I may never see her again either way. My limitation is that I can only go backwards or forwards by exactly one hundred years. Which means, if I try to go back to the future, I could be either forty-five years too early...or fifty-five years too late.”

“I’m sorry,” Saga said. “I thought jettisoning the bomb into space was the only way to stop it from hurting anyone else. I never meant for you to go through that door.”

“It’s okay. Like I said, you saved everyone in the stadium. That was my job, and I failed on my own.”

“I’m ready to go now,” Saga said, struggling out of bed. “Whew.” She was lightheaded. “And if it doesn’t work, I’ll get you back to 2102 myself. It’s my fault I’ve stolen time from you and Xearea.”

“How did you know her name?” he questioned.

“Eh, time travel, right?”

“I don’t think you’re actually ready.”

“I was dying when you pulled us out of 1957, so I think I can make it.”

After a few more arguments, Camden agreed to try to jump them both to 2102, along with their rescue dog. Unfortunately, it didn’t work, and they just ended up in 2157. Even worse, Saga was unable to do anything either. She was just too weak to use her door-walking time powers. But she knew she would get it some time. She just needed to rest for a couple of days.

For some reason, though, her powers never came back to her. And so they lived in a time period outside of their choosing for three and a half years.

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Microstory 750: Deck

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There was once four families who lived near each other in the neighborhood. Two of their houses were right next to each other on one street, while the other two were on the street behind them. They all moved in at about the same time, and though they were friendly with the other people in the neighborhood, they became particularly good friends with each other. The previous residents of their respective houses had built tall fences to separate them—of differing woods—so it looked messy and ugly. The new four families decided to replace them with shorter, gapped fences, so they could have conversations over them. They agreed to use the same materials too, so it would look more aesthetically pleasing. After the old fences were all down, however, they realized theirs was a silly plan. They were so close that there was no reason to be separate from each other at all. They instead only bought enough pickets to surround the outer edges of all of their houses, and kept their backyards open. Their children and pets were free to roam around and intermingle with each other. Over time, their relationships solidified further, and they wanted to expand their little subneighborhood into something more more substantial. One family agreed to install a pool in their quarter of the megayard. Another was responsible for the pool house/communal building. The third family built a dense and beautiful garden in their section. The fourth family kept their yard mostly bare, so the animals and children would have some room to run around, but also bought a small playground for the youngest of them. And in the middle, complete with extensions reaching to each of their houses, was a deck. It had a gazebo, and multiple levels, and an outdoor cooking area. Though everyone had their own problems, and even had some disagreements amongst each other, that deck, and all its peripherals, were always there to bring them back together.

Microstory 749: Puppy Foot

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When Almevary Balik was but a few months old, as her parents claim it, her first words were puppy foot. As impressive as it was that she spoke at such a young age, and that the utterance was composed of two words, it was even more impressive when considering how unlikely it is she even once heard the pair combined. Puppies have paws, rather than feet, and her family was made up of strictly cat people. She had essentially come up with a term on her own, which is something adults do every day, but infants, not so much. The phrase stuck with her, as family members would brag to anyone within earshot how intelligent and precocious Alma was. She herself couldn’t hear the end of it either, and when her rock band was trying to decide on a name of themselves, it was the obvious choice. Alma was the band’s frontwoman, and business leader. There were many small venues available to perform in, but she knew which ones to accept, and which to turn down. She did her homework, researching bigger and bigger names that were at all involved in the music industry, tracking their movement. Basically, she was looking for them to be discovered without it being obvious. Though the gigs they chose did not necessarily pay well up front, knowing who was in the audience paid off later. In months, they were skyrocketing to stardom, first by being an opening act for Peter Fireblood, and then being invited to tour with You’re Bad Grammar. Puppy Foot was soon a global phenomenon, but good things are never meant to last. Alma started receiving uncomfortable messages from one of her fans. In once sentence, he would speak of their destiny together, then her brutal death in the next. She contacted the authorities, but they were unable to do anything about it without a name. Over time, her stalker grew bolder, showing up as a shadow behind her on the street, and then sneaking into her trailer to move objects around. Still, the police could not catch him, because he did not so much as show his face to her once. Theoretically because this distant gaslighting was becoming too impersonal, one night, he decided to take things to the next level, and confront her directly. She was alone in her apartment when a werewolf burst through her window, and started growling at her. She tried to reason with him, but he refused to back down. We may never know exactly what the stalker werewolf intended to do, for as he stood up and prepared to attack, Almevary Balik grabbed the nearest object; an elvish star flute. She swung it towards him, and sliced off his whole front paw. This distracted the stalker long enough for her to get away, and find help. He bled out in her livingroom before he could be arrested.

Microstory 748: Lancelot

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In the late nineteenth century, there lived a baby boy named Lancelot. His parents were run out of their family business in a hostile takeover by one of their associates, leaving them with essentially nothing. A mysterious woman from another land, named Nivena came to them and said that she would give them everything they needed to live full and happy lives, but that they would have to give something up. They would have to give her their son. She promised to provide him with an even better life than they would have, and so they agreed. She brought him down into the deepest lake in the world. At the bottom lay an entire city, magically protected from the water and pressure above. There he lived and grew up until he was a young man, when he decided that he wanted to venture out and see what else there was out there. As soon as he broke the surface of the lake, he saw a young couple on their first date. Artair and Genevra were surprised to see a human being rise from the water, but were also excited to meet someone from such a bizarre and magical place. They became his tour guides, showing him what the world had to offer than he had missed while living such a sheltered life. But he also taught them advanced technologies that they could only dream of. To him, however, these were all quite normal, and he couldn’t believe how difficult life was for people on the surface of the planet. As the years went by, the three of them grew closer, and developed a polyamorous relationship between them, going so far as to get married. But the world was not as peaceful and safe as the lake of Lancelot’s home. War was breaking among many nationstates. Even in the beginning, they were calling it the Third Great War. Lancelot and Genevra felt the need to be part of the war in the most constructive way possible, so they began forming plans for an elite team of peacekeeping warriors, thinking Artair’s booming voice and commanding demeanor would be perfect to lead them. He was hesitant, for he neither wanted to fight, nor get in the middle of other people’s quarrels. Yet they were able to convince him, and together they founded a small organization called The Global Servants. Over time, this name was corrupted, as would their history, and they would be forever remembered as The Knights of the Round Table.

Microstory 747: Hex

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The Hex were a coven of witches at their prime in the early 20th century with malevolent intentions. At this point in the galaxy’s history, there were few regulations regarding craft. Some used their knowledge for good, while most used it simply to make their lives easier. A few, of course, saw craft as something to be used to its greatest potential, exploiting loopholes to further their agenda to control the worlds. At any one time, there were only six witches in this coven. As one member died, another would be called to replace them. No one fully understood how many times this cycle continued, since the coven would stealthily move across the stars before authorities could catch them. The oldest surviving member was a man name Epihui Ronson, who was the sickest of them all. Though he did not openly lead the group, he was its founder, and wielded the most control over them, by literally controlling their minds. He let his mouthpieces go on believing that everything the coven did was their idea. They were directed to make claims to new members that, upon their death, they would find themselves in an afterlife of paradise. In truth, the engagements they worked on mostly only served to increase Ronson’s own power. The engagements, however, did not always work as they were meant to. One such of these led the near-death of a woman named Heldika Marlian. Ronson took pity on her, and against his better judgment, chose not to finish her off, thinking she would die soon anyway. Having learned the truth about who Ronson was, and what the coven was for, Heldika pulled herself out of the ditch that was meant to be her grave, returned to the First World, and began to study everything she could about death. After years of practice, she learned how to bring people back from the brink. She then formed her own rival coven to follow Hex around, and revive Ronson’s sacrifices. With these, she was able to secure even greater numbers for the Doladerstun coven, eventually succeeding in creating the largest coven in galaxy history up to that point. One day, they combined their power, and operated as one. They defeated Ronson, ultimately having no choice but to kill his current five covenmates. Following their success, the Doladerstun coven broke apart into many distinct covens, each one named after a letter in the original. And that is how we came to have the Eleven Great Covens of Wiktea.